In 1912, Ricardo Batrell, a 32-year-old black veteran of Cuba's last war of independence, published his memoir under the title Para la historia: apuntes autobiográficos de la vida de Ricardo Batrell Oviedo. Batrell's narrative is extraordinary for several reasons. First, after his birth in 1880, Batrell witnessed crucial transformations of Cuban society: the abolition of slavery in 1886, the last War of Independence in 1895–8, US military occupations, the inauguration of the Cuban Republic, and the massacre of thousands of Afro-Cubans in the misnamed ‘Little War of 1912’. Although only covering the last two decades of the nineteenth century, his memoir narrates Cuban history from the standpoint of a subaltern among the subaltern: a former illiterate rural worker of the raza de color (coloured race), as Afro-Cubans were then collectively labelled. Second, Batrell was one of the only two black soldiers to write his own account of the War of Independence, a war in which Afro-Cubans were the overwhelming majority of the Liberation Army yet accounted for less than a third of the island's population. The other black soldier to have written his war reminiscences is José Isabel Herrera (or Mangoché), in 1948, in Impresiones de la guerra de la independencia (narrado por el soldado del Ejército Libertador). Indeed, it was Cuban novelist and ethnographer Miguel Barnet who wrote the narrative attributed to the famous runaway slave and war veteran Estebán Montejo in Biografía de un cimarrón, on the basis of interviews he conducted with the 104-year-old in the 1960s.

Third, after independence, Batrell refused to return to the position of subaltern and mobilised to demand tangible equality. He embodied Afro-Cubans' continuing struggle against white racism and calls for full integration into the new republican Cuba. Although the 1901 Constitution granted universal male suffrage, he decided to teach himself to read and write in order to issue manifestos and to write and publish his own interpretation of the independence struggle.

Para la historia is thus a fundamental primary source for anyone wishing to understand Cuba's transition from a Spanish colonial slave society to a republic under the US-imposed Platt Amendment. Thanks to Mark A. Sanders’ translation and edition, Batrell's perspective is now available in English under the title A Black Soldier's Story. This publication is all the more welcome since only a few copies of the original Para la historia printed in 1912 in Havana by Seoane & Alvarez have survived in libraries and private collections. Indeed, for almost a century Cuban publishers have neglected to reissue it.

Sanders, a professor of English at Emory University in Georgia, has immersed himself in early twentieth-century Cuba to provide a rich introduction to A Black Soldier's Story. Based on secondary literature, the 30 pages dedicated to Cuban history provide a solid background to Batrell's narrative and aptly insert an Afro-Cuban dimension into the presentation of the broad political, economic and social-racial developments from the late colonial period to 1912. Sanders avoids most of the shortcomings inherent to such a perilous exercise, with the minor problem that his focus on Cuba without a Latin America perspective tends to present black participation in the War of Independence as unique to Cuba, when Afro-Latin Americans were also overrepresented in the South American liberation armies of Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín in the 1810s. Although Batrell's narrative ends before 1902, Sanders’ section on ‘The Early Republic’ (pp. xxxi–xxxix) fittingly provides the context for Batrell's decision to write his memoir. Indeed, during this decade most former soldiers of the Liberation Army were marginalised, and new government policies of subsidised Spanish immigration, open racial discrimination and persecution of Afro-descended cultures led to mounting protest among Afro-Cuban veterans such as Batrell. Many of them participated in the Liberal Revolution of August 1906, attracted by its leaders’ promise of public jobs, which was later unfulfilled. Black mobilisation culminated in 1908 in the formation of the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Colour, PIC), which was banned by the Cuban Congress in 1910 and exterminated in the massacre of several thousand Afro-Cubans in 1912. Although Batrell did not join the party, he actively demanded equal recognition for blacks during these years. As a result, he was under constant surveillance and imprisoned during the 1912 island-wide repression. At that time, he had just managed to publish Para la historia, but the police seized a hundred pages he had written, including what should have become the second part of his memoir covering the post-1900 period. After 1912, Batrell vanished from the public sphere and never published again. Curiously, the silence that was then forced upon him was echoed in the early 1960s by Barnet, who deliberately cut off the last 60 years of Montejo's life, silencing the latter's post-independence experience and participation in the PIC.

Sanders’ introduction ends with an analysis of ‘Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban Jeremiad’. It appropriately singles out five major themes or arguments that readers will find in Batrell's memoir: black masculinity, racial democracy, racial discrimination, black valour, and dedication to the cause of Cuba Libre (p. xlix). Yet it is odd to label Batrell's powerful narrative as a ‘Jeremiad’, a rather puzzling choice of words to define the proud black veteran's recollection of his war achievements and claims to historical recognition.

Undoubtedly, the translation and careful edition of Batrell's narrative by Sanders will fascinate all students and scholars interested in post-slavery race relations, independence processes, nation-building and Cuban history. Let's hope that it will also encourage Cuban publishers to reissue Para la historia and make this unique story available again to Cuban readers.